He used launchd as his example since opinions backed by code have always had more weight in BSD communities. This led to all the systemd comparisons. But in reality, you can ignore all of that.

What his talk was about was a keynote about the ongoing paradigm shift from 'big unix iron' to ever more ephemereal OS instances that move, live, change and die faster and more rapidly. This conflicts with a number of UNIX designs where boottime matters and sets things in stone for the remainder of the current run.

These are problems that need addressing; people need to think about them and come up with ideas and solutions. The project and the community needs to decide to tackle these issues or declare them out of scope. In that context systemd is an interesting case study, since some of it tries to solve similar problems to provide a more dynamic and more MP-friendly runtime. The actually used software to accomplish this is secondary (while acknowledging that everybody has of course personal favourites and preferences).